Tape Measure
by AmiRide
Summary: "Life isn't measured in pounds. Love isn't. Kindness, worth, intelligence…Fang, you don't use a tape measure to weigh those. So why is everyone suddenly being so different?" Fang's eyes were laughing. "Max, that's all true, but you know…most of these kids have known you since middle school. If you leave one summer and come back 120 pounds lighter, people are going to notice."


**I'd been getting a lot of requests for a story like this, and they're so fun to write. Enjoy!**

* * *

It was a great thing, weight loss. Not easy to achieve, but Maximum Ride wasn't one for easy challenges. It had changed her life so drastically that it was almost funny that she hadn't given thought to it until she had.

She'd spent the majority of her childhood scarfing down snacks and sweets and burgers and fries and pizza without a care. She was energetic and wild and always in movement, so the carbs didn't have time to settle in before they were already gone. When her parents got divorced in the fifth grade, she had stopped running track and her eating habits finally hit home. Her body didn't exactly realize what was happening until about the summer before the sixth grade, so she got by the end of elementary school still skinny, if less fit, thanks to her speedy metabolism.

But on her first day of middle school, Max was hardly what you could call slender anymore. She had permanent baby fat padding to her cheeks, and her belly had softened and rounded. Her knees became progressively fatter.

"Thunder thighs," her brother Ari taunted. He was lean and muscled and couldn't be called out on anything having to do with appearance.

It got harder to control what she ate. Max wasn't dumb, and she knew she wasn't what you could call pretty anymore, though with her mop of curly blond hair and her big brown eyes, she could easily have been. But she thought the kids at school would be understanding. Not shallow. That they would judge her based on her personality and not her looks.

Unfortunately for Max, most middle school kids are pretty shallow and dumb, so by the time the eighth grade graduation rolled around, she'd made a grand total of one friend, Monique Westerfield, who, by some twist of deeply stinging ironic fate, was gorgeous and skinny and almost too pretty to look at. She was the nicest person Max had ever met, and she called her Nudge.

And so she set off into the great big world of high school with her one friend by her side, stuffing her face with her Aunt Val's cookies and Kraft mac and cheese that didn't even taste good but that she kept eating just because she was used to it. A lot of people would whisper that oh, it was a shame that the younger Ride girl lacked ambition. She could be so pretty, as pretty as her older sister Maya. Look how her other two siblings turned out; both in Ivy League colleges, both in relationships, both so attractive! It was really too bad that young Max had taken her parents' divorce so badly.

But that really wasn't it. Max was way over her parents' divorce. She liked her new stepmom, and the guy her mom was dating was actually kind of fun. And ambition, she had plenty of that. She just hadn't seriously thought about losing weight before.

Of course she was the target of bullies at school. But Nudge was sufficiently pretty to keep away the worst of the insults, and it was known around Sliver Grove High that Max Ride didn't take crap from anyone.

Of course her mother, her sister, her cousins, everyone kept trying to get her to become skinny again. But she took their well-intentioned but potentially hurtful comments in stride. Fat wasn't bad or not bad; it was simply part of who she was. And it wasn't as if she was _obese_.

Of course she remembered what it was like to be skinny. Skinny was light, skinny was pretty. Skinny was room, skinny was running without jiggling. Skinny was acceptable, and fat was not.

_It's a shame the younger Ride girl lost herself so quickly_.

That wasn't true either. Being fat didn't change who you were. Max was still Max. It didn't change her likes and dislikes or her opinions or her outlook on life (although it did tweak that last one a bit). It didn't change how nice she was or how intelligent she was or how funny or witty or clever she was. She was still the same person inside, no matter how much she weighed. She hated comments like that.

Also, she knew she was set slightly apart from other fat kids, because unlike a lot of them, Max not losing herself also meant she hadn't lost her physical abilities. As far as she knew, she was still the fastest runner in the class, though no one would ever know because she hated the way it made her body jiggle, so she lagged behind the group in laps and the best grade she'd gotten in PE since the sixth grade was a C+. She could outrun Nudge, who currently held the title of fastest runner of the class, whenever they raced in her backyard.

But it was only until the end of sophomore year, when the doctor declared (almost proudly, too, like he had been waiting to give this announcement since Marian Janssen had come to him with her daughter four years ago) that Maximum Valencia Maxine Ride was currently 100 pounds overweight, that Max gave a single thought to actually getting rid of her fat.

So she'd made a few calls, and packed one small bag and stuck a label on the inside that read "fat clothes." Then she'd packed another huge one and donated it to a homeless shelter. With the money she'd saved since the seventh grade from chores and allowance and odd jobs and tooth fairy money, she bought a whole wardrobe of cute, size 2 clothing and a return trip plane ticket to Phoenix, Arizona. She packed the fat clothes and hung up all the size 2s in her closet, kissed her mom goodbye, and spent the summer at her aunt Val's house.

* * *

Valencia Martinez's house was big and roomy and homey and comfortably and felt and smelled just the way home should, like love and cookies. Max had shown up on Aunt Val's doorstep on June 10th and had given herself three days of rest, soaking up Val's warmth and love like a sponge. She couldn't get enough of her aunt's affection. Her mother loved her in her own way—a little more disciplined and less physically affectionate—but Aunt Val's way was much nicer. You could feel her love. She had huge brown eyes like Max's, though no one would ever for an instant guess that Marian and Val were sisters. Val had inherited their father's distinctly Hispanic look, while their white mother had given Marian blond hair and green eyes. To Max, Aunt Val was the prettiest woman who had ever lived. She'd enjoyed basking in her glow, and then she'd braced herself for a long, hard summer of working out and dieting.

It was the funnest summer of her life.

She hadn't been planning on letting her aunt in on what she was trying to do, but Val and her daughter Ella caught on quickly enough, and launched themselves into the race like it was a game. They turned it into one: workout parties in the backyard after dinner, timing how many sit-ups Max could do in a minute, how fast she could chug her protein shake in the morning before setting out to jog. They participated in her exercises with her. Aunt Val made vegetarian meals that tasted even more delicious than her regular cooking. Max's cousin Ella was only a grade below her, and the two of them stayed up late some nights, telling each other secrets, giggling and tossing their pillows at one another before Ella sat up quickly and forced Max to go to sleep, because it wasn't healthy to stay up that late with all the stuff she'd been doing, only to wake her up early the next morning to jog through the streets of their neighborhood in the first rays of the sun when everything was still coated with dew. She'd started slowly, but as the weeks went by, she increased her speed until she was whizzing past everything without having a care towards her receding belly that jiggled less and less. Her thighs firmed. The sit-ups, after just burning calories, began to give her real stomach muscles.

Max's bag of clothes was so small that she had to do the laundry every other day. Gradually, she had to start borrowing too-big hand-me-downs of Ella's from her cousin Tandy, and then from Val, and eventually from Ella herself. Somewhere along the way, she learned to cook. She, the girl who found ways to mess up cereal, cooking! It was beyond amazing. Ella started a game of testing Max's metabolism with ice cream. Aunt Val had protested at first with the reason that all of Max's hard work would go to waste, but quickly found out that miraculously, nothing had changed since Max was ten, and as long as she stayed in movement like she used to, she could down two burgers, a large fries and a shake without gaining a pound.

Her baby fat fell away. Her stomach became increasingly smaller until it was flat and muscled. Her legs had always been long, and now their length was visible, long and smooth and firm and tan from the afternoons swimming laps in the neighborhood pool. Her one bathing suit completely fell off of her by August, and for the first time in her life, Maximum Ride did not feel the slightest bit self-conscious when she borrowed a bikini from her cousin Ella. She could now fully appreciate what it meant to have C-cup breasts, because they didn't melt into her stomach under her shapeless clothes. She walked tall, now. Confident in her beauty, because it was no secret anymore that Maximum Valencia Maxine Ride was beautiful. Long, wildly curly blond hair, big brown eyes, and friendly freckles that now came with a brand new figure, even complete with curves.

Two days before she'd left, she'd video-called Nudge with Ella beside her, and Nudge had been so shocked that she'd fallen out of her chair. The three of them had laughed until they cried. For the first time in a very long time, Max felt pretty, happy and lighter than a butterfly shedding its cocoon. She left Valencia Martinez's house 120 pounds lighter than she had entered it.

She should have thought of this sooner.

* * *

It was 10:56 when Max's cab pulled up from LAX to her mother's house. She took the spare key from under the doormat and entered as quietly as she could, setting her one small duffle bag that was slightly heavier, now stuffed with cookies as a goodbye present from her aunt, on the marble floor of the foyer, took off her Toms and hung up her coat. Her loss of weight hadn't done anything for her feet; they were still huge. They caused the carpeted stairs to creak as she crept up to the second floor of her house. One of the things she'd always loved about her house was that the kitchen was on the second floor. Her room was across the hall from it, and she could easily sneak in for a midnight snack.

She pushed the door open quietly and opened the fridge. Her mother had evidently gone shopping. It was stocked to the brim with cakes and muffins and sandwich bread and Kraft mac and cheese and chicken nuggets, all Max's favorites. She grabbed a muffin and bit into it eagerly, waiting for the feeling of relief and satisfaction from the chocolate bits and vanilla cake.

It didn't come.

She put the muffin down, downed a glass of mineral water and called Ella to let her know she'd arrived home safely as she padded across the hall to her room, leaving the muffin uneaten on the kitchen counter.

* * *

**I hope you've all been having a great summer!**

**Noodles for now (like toodles, but less…I don't know, flippy-hair sounding)**

**~AmiRide****


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